Blogiversary favorite: Things that happen to pressure cookers

A day late for the blogiversary (I was pretty busy yesterday), I'm re-posting a favorite of mine. It was topical at the time, but regardless of the specific news story (then Mark Foley, now Larry Craig) it says a lot of what I feel is important to say about culture, politics, and sexuality.

Here's my take on the whole Foley thing: It's not a coincidence.

It's not a bizarre coincidence that the co-chair of the House Caucus on Missing and Exploited Children is also a pedophile. And it's not just a coincidence that it's mostly (not exclusively, but mostly, and by an impressive margin) Conservatives who are being knocked down like tenpins by sex scandals. Yeah, part of it is that power corrupts, and the consolidation of power that has increased dramatically in Washington these past five years has been massively corrupting, particularly of Conservatives.

But it's not just that. It's that it's built into the system.

When you suppress, suppress, suppress, you create a pressure cooker. Pressure cookers only do the one thing, yet everyone is all suprised by the explosion. In terms of psychology, you generally only suppresssuppresssuppress when you have something serious that needs suppressing, and you generally only blame everyone else for being a perv when you need to avoid blaming yourself. It's called "projection." Look it up.

These Conservative freaks with their constant and intense fascination with Teh Gay and Teh Sex and Teh Dildoes, who want to make laws about my bedroom and yours, my marriage and yours, my orgasm and yours, what do you think is on their minds? This morning, while I was deciding if I should go back to using an alarm clock, and thinking about a writing project, and making coffee, and thinking about t-shirts (I swear by the Goddess, I was thinking about t-shirts), the Foleys and Dawn Edens and Santorums and Fred Phelpses of the world were thinking about gay gay naughty gay sex with boys how naughty how gay I must write a column to denounce that oh look I have a woody.

That's how it works.

Two things: (1) If you're a sick motherfucker, you have a higher tendency to denounce everyone else for being a sick motherfucker. (2) If you have natural, normal urges, 'cause you're, lemme think...human, that you suppresssuppresssuppress, those urges, when inevitably expressed, won't be expressed in the nice, normal way they started.

I've written about this before. Suppression is not only a bad model, but it's had a good long test run, and people should have figured out by now that it's not working.

(Save the Missing & Exploited Cross-posts!)